


A Name and a Country

by ninhursag



Category: Salt (2010)
Genre: Canon Het Relationship, Character Study, F/M, Het, angsty girls, toppy girls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-22
Updated: 2010-08-22
Packaged: 2017-10-11 05:11:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/108783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninhursag/pseuds/ninhursag
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Evelyn Salt made up her mind about where her loyalties lay before she left North Korea. No warnings, but most definite movie spoilers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Name and a Country

She doesn't have a real name, not one that's true to everyone. She answers to Evelyn Salt but the name her mother and father gave her is Chenko. Her mother is dead, or so they told her, a long time ago, when she didn't know she wasn't supposed to ask.

She aches when she shouldn't. She should be too numb to hurt. She should be _dead_, beaten to death as a spy in a tiny North Korean prison cell or killed in a snazzy, televised show trial, the video forwarded to her government for their edification.

Her colleagues should down a drink for her and say, but for the grace of god. The one boy (your little arachnologist, Ted calls him, but his name is _Mike_) she left sleeping in his bed should spend at least a few weeks wondering what happened to her before before he moves on to the coeds in his lecture section and she turns into a memory to tell his someday to be son before the kids goes off to college. She'd hoped he might cry, maybe.

She's not dead, no one needs to cry. Instead she's walking across the border to supposed safety with marines at her back. She's soul numb, heart numb. She isn't supposed to have a heart, not one that beats for anything but the wild romance of motherland.

She doesn't have a mother anyway. Right now all she has is Ted walking next to her, her superior in the Company and sometime drinking buddy, an escort of marines, and the knowledge that every step she takes is getting her one step further out of the prison hellhole where she should have died.

Her shoes are too thin and the bottom of her fucking soles ache when they press into pavement. And then Ted leans in a little closer, palm not quite touching her lower back like he knows she doesn't need the support.

"Why'd you do it?" she asks, not really expecting an answer. Her cover was blown and well blown. The rules say she should have died and Ted always believes in those particular rules.

She isn't looking at him, but she can hear the ruefulness in his voice when he says, "I didn't do it. He did. Once he found out where you were, there was no stopping him. He petitioned the senate, the state department. We didn't need the publicity."

Publicity. Her world shifts. Teeters on its axis.

He did it. Him. Mike. She blinks, and there across the border, steps away from where she is, she sees him coming out to meet her. He is not beautiful. One man-boy in well pressed civies and a messy light brown beard, so out of place among the soldiers. She doesn't flinch.

Mike. His eyes are a clear hazel and he's looking at her like she's all he sees. He doesn't call her name, but he mouths it, the shape so clear on his lips. He's almost smiling, almost vibrating, no one taught him how not to look nervous, how to hold up his head and not show fear. It should be a weakness.

She closes her eyes. She doesn't flinch. He did this. He came for her. The next thing she thinks is that _now they'll know his name, now they'll know who he is_. She imagines his soft mouth, red with blood, clever fingers gone lax, hazel eyes wide open and unseeing. Now they'll-- no. No. That's what he's got her for.

He's got her. And just like that she defects. She has a name and a country. Her country has hazel eyes. _Evelyn_, he calls her, the German accent sticking to the shape of his vowels, and that's the name she'll answer to from now on. That's the voice she'll answer to.

She's not dead and she's not numb and she might be tired and aching, but she's working now. No time to feel it. She crosses the border, and Ted is behind her with those marines, giving her the space to go to Mike.

The border is behind her but he is in front of her. She lets him take her hands. He smiles. He looks watery, tired, surprisingly beautiful after all. Her country has hazel eyes.

"Evelyn," he says, his real voice a perfect match for the one she'd dreamed up, right down to the cracks and the shapes of the syllables. "You're alive. I knew you would be."

She shouldn't be. Because she is, her country is in danger and he doesn't even know it yet. That's all right, Evelyn Salt has been trained by the best.


End file.
